Here Are The Gears of War 4 Issues The Coalition Is Tackling First

Gears of War 4 has been out in the wild for about two weeks now. It’s a safe, but fantastic entry into the Gears franchise. But the launch hasn’t been without problems. Community feedback points to several issues with multiplayer and horde in Gears of War 4, and The Coalition is hard at work on fixes.

This one has been a big pain point amongst those in Core and Social. Gameplay has been dominated with long range combat and we do have some tuning coming up that will address this. We expect this in the next big Title Update.

I haven’t seen this in action, but a quick look at the Gears Reddit confirms it’s a problem. I like my Gnasher/Enforcer combo too much to worry about the Hammerburst.

Competitive Lancer/Gnasher adjustments

We have some additional changes we are planning for the competitive Lancer and Gnasher. We will have more details on this in the future. We expect this in the next big Title Update.

Matches not starting with full amount of players

We have a team looking into this immediately as this one is pretty concerning. There may be a quick fix that we can do on the backend to address this but it may require some additional work that would come in a later Title Update. We will do what we can to mitigate and correct this one as soon as possible.

I’m crossing my fingers for a quick fix. Playing Arms Race 2v5 hurts. Maybe The Coalition can just cancel any matches that don’t have full teams at the start until a larger fix can be implemented.

Harsher Quit Penalties

We are looking to implement some harsher quit penalties to players in an upcoming update. Unfortunately this requires a bit more legwork but we are seeing if we can prioritize and have this come out sooner rather than later. We expect this in a future Title Update but not the next large one.

It’s a problem for every multiplayer game. Plus, The devs need to account for people losing connection. It’s a delicate balancing act punishing quitters while also understanding that people’s connections drop. Best solution? Give harsher penalties based on number of quits during a certain timeframe. Say three quits within an hour.

Competitive/Core Lobbies

This requires an extensive amount of work but we have it on our roadmap and are hoping to have this out in a future large Title Update.

Cool, backing out each time the game is over isn’t ideal.

General Pack feedback items

We have received a mountain of feedback regarding our Gears Pack system. We are looking into ways of improving the experience for all users and we are also looking at additional opportunities to help players obtain packs. We will keep you posted on these notes in the near future.

There’s only one way to improve it. Lower the price of packs/increase credits earned during matches.

Footsteps of teammates much louder than opponents

We believe DeeBee footstep audio seems to be in a good place based off of feedback from you all. We are looking at increasing human and swarm footstep audio. This will be in a future title update.

We will be experimenting with Social crossplay weekends. During this time we will be looking at backend telemetry on the performance of players. After we gather some information, we will look into what we can potentially do for further crossplay opportunities. We will also be looking into offering Bonus XP in specific modes that will be constantly rotating either each day or on a weekly basis to help incentivize people to try out each of our different game modes. This would be for both platforms XB1 and PC. We will keep you posted on when these updates hit.

Nice. I don’t see anything wrong with implementing crossplay for Social. If people care about more competitive play, they’ll jump into Core/Competitive.

Gnasher shots firing but ammo not depleting and registering

We have a fix for this in our next large Title Update

0% / 100% UI notifications

This is tied to Unreal rounding numbers up and down and thus confusing people with the numbers they are displaying. We are going to see if we can address this so it comes across a bit more clear on what your true damage and damage taken is. This will occur in a future update.

Backfilling in Horde Matchmaking

We want to remind people here that you can invite people from your friends list if someone drops off. We will continue looking into this but wanted to remind that this feature exists and also allows for the user who is being invited to understand what scenario they are about to enter.

Or, you could develop a shorter Horde mode. I love Horde. I don’t love dumping 2-3 hours into a full match all the time. Give us a shorter Horde option with a steeper ramp in difficulty.

KOTH/Execution Time Adjustments

Execution I believe is currently set for 10 minutes. That’s long! We are going to readjust this so players aren’t stalemating for long periods of time. KOTH will be reduced to 1 round in social and we will listen to additional dialogue from Core players if this needs to be reduced down or not. We expect these changes in the next Title Update if not sooner.

Windows Insiders not being able to play

There is now a new Insider Build that corrects this issue. (Build 14951). You can read more about it here: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/10/19/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-14951-for-mobile-and-pc/

Ranks not displaying for other users in Squad

We are aware of this. We want to display ranks for other users in the squad. This will be in a future Title Update, but will not be present in the next one.

Horde Class Icons in Scoreboard

We are also aware of this one. We want people to be aware of other classes they are working with in-game. This will be in a future Title Update, but will not be present in the next one.

PC Mics not working correctly at all times

We are looking into this one and have a future Title Update that will address this issue.

Horde Score abuse issues

We have received a few reports on this and have fixes coming related to this. We will probably also look into wiping leaderboards after this is done to ensure players can compete to achieve legitimate scores.

Grenade spawning issue

We have this issue logged and will have a fix for this in a future Title Update.

Players sometimes leaving maps

We have this issue logged and will have a fix for this in a future Title Update. Players caught abusing this will be subject to disciplinary action including suspensions and bans.

It’s a pretty sizable list of fixes. And not all of them will happen soon. Some are quick, easy fixes. Others take longer. It took years to get Gears of War 4 to your console. It’s going to take longer than a day to fix the issues that popped up along the way. The Coalition has a plan to fix these issues and wants to “provide a great amount of transparency” during the process.

Plus, not every fix or update is included in the list above. As for a specific timeline on some of these fixes? A member of The Coalition’s community team says the first big Title Update will land when the first map hits. I can’t find an exact date on when the first two maps are supposed to hit. The Coalition says we’ll be getting two maps every month for a year. So that should start in November or December at the latest.

Are you having any issues with Gears of War 4 not addressed above?

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